Healthcare providers have difficulty reconciling various revenue systems to the bank accounts. Amounts are posted at the patient account level in an accounts receivable system of a healthcare provider, while amounts are posted at the payment level on bank statements for the healthcare provider. Each payment may represent reimbursement for hundreds of individual patient accounts. Payments posted on the bank statement could represent a cash payment, an individual check, an Electronic Funds Transfer (“EFT”) for payment of a medical claim from an insurance company, or a deposit ticket for cash or checks collected over the counter.
Problems arise when the various sources of revenue data are commingled into one financial data collection. For instance, cash payments and individual patient checks deposited via one deposit ticket make it difficult to reconcile total cash collected to the individual patient accounts posted on an accounts receivable system. Furthermore, information relating to payment of a medical claim by an insurance company may be received by a healthcare provider such that the information regarding a particular patient accounting system or provider entity is commingled with data for different patient accounting systems or provider entities.
In the Healthcare industry these problems are typically dealt with by using manually intensive data entry. According to some market research, most healthcare providers perform daily cash reconciliation using Excel® spreadsheets. The process typically requires an average of one or more full time employees per hospital or health system accounting entity. With manual data entry, there is the possibility for error, and delays in data entry may increase audit problems and financial risk.
Current reconciliation technology that has sought to alleviate these problems has not accomplished its goal. Many systems and methods still require much manual data entry and require costly installation of software at a healthcare provider's location. Furthermore, many of these systems are platform dependent, and can only be used with specific patient accounting systems. Thus, there is a need for a healthcare cash reconciliation system that is cost effective, system-agnostic, and solves the aforementioned problems.